The bottom line on President Trump’s trade truce with China is this, says Goldman Sachs: Once negotiators have finished their three months of talks, the U.S. is ‘more likely than not’ to double most of the tariffs imposed on its rival’s products this year.
In other words, the risk of further escalation in a trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has been delayed rather than significantly reduced, and concerns that the conflict will hurt corporate profits while undermining the benefits of last year’s GOP-led tax cuts are likely to continue casting a pall over U.S. financial markets.
Already, a nearly weeklong swoon in U.S. stocks has wiped out initial gains after Trump announced the results of his negotiations with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires.
Investors are clearly reassessing the cease-fire and concluding that it “did little to address specifics on many important issues, said Marina Grushin, an analyst with the Wall Street bank.
Indeed, Wall Street’s growing skepticism was fanned by the president himself, who said on Twitter that if the two sides can’t reach an agreement, he remains a “tariff man.”
In such an environment, says Goldman, it’s probably that 10 percent duties on some $200 billion of Chinese imports will be raised to 25 percent after March 1, when the armistice expires. Trump has also threatened levies on all of the country’s remaining shipments to the U.S., which total about $267 billion, a strategy he says is necessary to curb a trade imbalance and halt Chinese theft of American intellectual property.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 800 points the day the day Trump moved from optimistic about his China deal to threatening and has tumbled 4.6 percent this week, to 24,374. The blue-chip index and the broader S&P 500, which dropped the same amount, have both given up all of their gains this year.
Although three months isn’t sufficient to address the issues between the U.S. and China, many analysts say the cease-fire is an optimistic step. The Business Roundtable, an organization representing the 200 largest U.S. companies, concurs.
“Our hope is they accomplish enough in the first 90 days to continue conversations,” Josh Bolten, the organization’s president and chief of staff in former President George W. Bush’s White House, said Friday. “We’ll do everything we can do to help the U.S. government arrive at a solution that resolves the many problems that our companies face in competing in and with China.”
